


six and the corners twist

by miehczyslaw



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon - Manga, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I JUST LOVE THEM SO SO SO MUCH HECK, M/M, Prose Poem, Romance, Strangers to Lovers, implied cannibalism bc, the au where kaneki is an one-eyed ghoul of birth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 06:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6554206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miehczyslaw/pseuds/miehczyslaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaneki says a lot by just staying with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	six and the corners twist

**Author's Note:**

> what do you mean hide is not alive and being sappy and safe with ken

**i.**

Hide is young and smells like sunset.

He has the bones of colors, a heart scraping and covered with stickers, and a silver toothy smile tugging at his lips until they are painted with crimson (like Ken's hands, which are _red, red, red_ as his palpable memory on the other side of the bed).

Hide is an average student who must strive to get decent grades, if not passable, who is fascinated by songs in English, although he does not understand the language—that this word is so sticky, you know. ‘L-l-love,’ it sounds very cool—and who repels books because they're boring and he does not want to be boring. Once, he says softly as a breeze seeps through the window and with his hands under his shirt, that for him he would make the effort to read the Divine Comedy and end up crying salt. Kaneki believes him.

Hide combs his hair like a hedgehog even if it is unsightly and does not go with fashion, and is natural without gel. Then he accommodates the tines and is decent (handsome) with his hair back. A river of corn—so warm, so familiar, coming down by his neck. Ken touches his hair sometimes at night and apologizes, because he is going to mess it in sin scarlet, but Hide is a little too strong and replies to him that there is no problem (there never is) and allows him to do it, always smiling at him in a way that’s almost painful. His teeth are crowded as if frightened and his ribs as if wistful.

Hide shines just because he tries.

( _He is in love with a ghoul._ )

**ii.**

Their first encounter should have never happened, is what society dictates at least.

Hide does not look for him or hint to find out his existence. There are ghouls and doves, camouflaged in pale faces or flirtatious smiles, high and low, men and women, all dangerous. The news warns that there is a case of a Glutton in the district where he lives and the people should be cautious, but he does not pay attention.

His daily life consists of going to school, joking with some classmates, heading back to his apartment, and thinking that rabbits die alone and that although he is no rabbit he has been alone since he has had memory so there is no case.

Then one day the routine is broken with a sonorous _craccccccck_ and Hide only knows that there is an extremely noisy noise—because he likes redundancies, after learning its meaning in a dictionary—in the alley facing the window of his room. Curious and excited maybe, but not fearful, he puts on a pair of sneakers and goes to see what (or who) caused it. And he expects a stray cat, a stray dog, some children playing they are knights, or whatever, except—

Drip-drip-drop.

(The smell of fresh blood, freshly spilled blood, innocent blood.)

—another boy. One that extends the bowels of a young woman like they were a curtain, who delves into their juicy organs of spice, munching and mash. Hungry.

Drip-drip-drop.

Hide opens his eyes, leaving his air and speech; he can only just remain standing, watching the surreal picture in silence. The lights of cars passing in the next street increase the shadow of the two in that inhospitable corner unknown by kindness.

Hide notes that his hair is white as the bottomless pit and is facing away from him, ignoring his presence.

It is a ghoul. Busy. With a corpse.

It's his chance to slip away.

Nevertheless—

Hide winces. Mild, almost nothing. But loud enough so that the ghoul hears and suspiciously turns around to see him. With meat on his lips, there is a boil in his eyes and one eye, only one eye, is painted in red.

“Oh,” Hide mumbles. “Is this the new look of the ghouls or what?”

He does not know why he says such nonsense in this circumstance. But there is something in his question that makes the boy’s shoulders tense less and not jump on his jugular.

They look at themselves.

Clearly.

Nothing moves there. Not even time.

**iii.**

The next day, Hide is sincerely surprised at being alive, without any amputations or lacerations at least, sitting at his desk in the university Kamii for history class. A classmate sitting beside him questions, “Why are you so unfocused? Did you break your cables, Nagachika?” and he is very, very tempted to tell the truth.

‘Nothing man, only yesterday I had a near death experience and left unharmed. I have considered being a Buddhist or something.’

“Uhm, nah! I slept late. Nothing else,” he lies instead.

Since it is more intelligent and he (he... let him live?) should follow (follow the steps of the monster who ran away and let him go to find it and be killed this time?) his routine (which is already broken into a thousand least seven sunflower petals).

There is no possibility of return. He understands.

Because the Grim Reaper took his scythe and then balanced it a few centimeters from his face like a pendulum, but did not cut him with his sharp gray solitude, only oscillated the blade, and swung back again and again—

Frankly that intrigues him.

Why does a ghoul not kill a human if the opportunity is granted?

(And his unique eye is also unusual.) All this is meaningless, as the evening sky is covered with cellophane Hide argues that he will have to investigate this. Soon. The uncertainty infects his stems and legs, making them rigid with the imminent expectation as the day progresses and the time to return home comes. Hide passes through the alley, waiting for something—someone—that he has no idea of whether it will even be there.

But—

 _He is there_.

(And you do not know me and I do not know you but I think you're my soulmate.)

He brings casual clothes and an eye patch. He is restless, too lost in his carnivorous nature. At least this time there is no body, not yet. And as soon he sees him reach, he shrugs slightly. Hide realizes his icy attitude, how he was tired of fighting to sustain a withering benignity and being shattered, even if in the light he looks like a human.

They look, and their loneliness is understood and—

“Hey, you did not kill me,” Hide says.

“...You did not fear me,” accuses the other, half incredulous half in shame.

So it begins.

**iv.**

His name is Ken Kaneki and he says, without hesitation, that his name is synonymous with despair, although the kanji are written different and Ken Kaneki actually means something else. Hide does not know if he jokes or not because he has this smile of quiet glass, dripping blood on his commissure constantly, too sad. If he looks it from a different angle it seems like a smile of cotton—murderous yet smooth to the touch—and he decides he likes it, even if it is painful.

Ken is a ghoul of one eye, one of those very rare ghouls that hide in the sewers to splash in anxiety. The child of a human and a ghoul, Hide learns later. Ken tells him this once he grabs confidence. That he has a sister who comes and goes on her feathers of jungle and desires of destruction, that his father owns a fairly busy cafe in the district, and that his mother died loving and being loved.

“Anteiku is a safe place, but not for me, I die in life more than is average.”

(And that is why I fall into hunger and it overwhelms me, fitting its nails on me and I scream. But it is useless, I sink into my basic needs.)

His guts roaring like a dragon. Irrational. Bloody.

Hide, in an impulse the same day where everything initiates, invites him to Anteiku only to be rejected by Kaneki. From then on he gives up. However, they continue to be in the alley. Daily, weekly, monthly.

Without any sense, because—

(I should surrender you to authorities, should go to the CCG, should be scared of you and avoid you.)

He should, and yet—

(I do not eat you, I have not bruised your throat and ripped your womb. I have not silenced you to protect me.)

They did not do it—

(why?)

Because—

“There's something familiar about you,” Kaneki suddenly confesses. It's been six months since they met. Hide denies it, with a forest fire in his stomach.

“Nah, man.”

( _I've just become your home; the place you can always go back. It's a normal thing, right?_ ).

And Ken smiles, broken but with affection. He hurts him with his cruel tenderness.

**v.**

Kaneki is staying where he can, with money stolen from his victims, and assists to Kamii also—to his surprise. Hide thinks it is not right, not the fact that he devours people, that he doesn’t have a house and a fixed roof that transmits him peace, especially for studies—and offers his apartment to him. Kaneki moves in with some resistance.

They begin to live together.

Ken has a hell in his head, a soul of snow and frost, and he frightens more for himself than over the damage to him, Hide notes quickly.

There are times when he wakes in the middle of the night with gasps and tears on his cheeks and Hide needs to calm him, to assure that they are (both) safe.

“Everything is fine. I know, I always know okay?”

There are times when he does not return in weeks. When he does it is with dirty clothes and scarlet rubies dripping from his hair and teeth. Kaneki trembles and apologizes.

“I am sorry, sorry, so sorry...”

And he curls up against him, painting the sheets, his shirt, and his boxers to sleep, all in the blood of others. Hide has to clean up after. Ken sniffs his neck and Hide allows it and he hears the _tum-tum-tum_ of his chest—that defective box—that with which he wants Ken, almost accidentally.

Kaneki calms down, then.

Hide is like a gold medal, shiny and bright. And he intertwines his fingers with Kaneki’s. Stroking his knuckles, his palm, his fingers, and going to his wrist. All with a shared and very slow secrecy.

Less disturbed, Ken whispers:

“You're something like a walking anesthesia, you know?”

(By your side the demons are sleeping.)

He steals an honest laugh.

“Aah, really?”

(I'm glad, I'm glad a lot.)

Ken nods. He draws cats at the edges of his skin with his bare hands and a clear colored smile, almost of invisible ink. It does not matter, the blood or old appetite. He’s dazzled. Both with their hearts made into fists and scraped, like Hide's knees.

Kaneki eats his heartbeats and in return Hide dries his poison crying, traveling in his hair of chalk where he deposits a chaste kiss.

He questions whether he will die loving or will love to death.

Because Ken is ruthless, at least he tries. And Hide is not interested in what his diet is based on. And if that makes him an accomplice or maybe an idiot—

“Do not go, Kaneki.”

“...What do you mean? I'm still here.”

Doesn't matter.

Because they are partners in crime.

(And that is why we bury this love in a shared grave. I close my arm-doors around your body. I pray to you in a whisper, “Please do not turn away from my side.”)

So he allows him to steal his sanity. He allows him to lick his colored bones and pull his toothy smile silver to bleed out. But Ken just drinks the coffee from his eyes.

**vi.**

(And they breathe. Through the skin, the mouth, the wound).

He says a lot by just staying with him.


End file.
